There is a curious disconnect between the Brazilian public debate and the economic reality it pretends to face. The reduction of working hours is enthusiastically discussed — 4×3 scale, end of 6×1, four-day week — as if the Brazilian worker’s problem was working too much. It is not. The problem is what is produced per hour worked, and in this indicator Brazil occupies a less than honorable place in the concert of nations.
The numbers are known to those who take the trouble to consult them. According to the International Labor Organization, Brazil is the 94th most productive country in the world out of a list of 184. The Brazilian worker produces, on average, 21.2 dollars per hour worked, at purchasing power parity. We are behind Uruguay, Chile, Argentina — and, in a detail that deserves reflection, also behind Cuba. This is not a temporary statistical embarrassment. It is a snapshot of three decades of stagnation, extreme corporatism and lack of capital for investment.
International comparison makes the picture clearer. The German worker produces 93.81 dollars per hour; the French, 88.15; the British, 78.05; the Italian, 77.09. The German delivers, in sixty minutes, the equivalent of almost four and a half hours of Brazilian work. At the top of the hierarchy are Ireland, Norway, Luxembourg and Switzerland, with productivity ranging between five and seven times ours. Countries that, it is worth noting, seriously discuss reducing working hours — but do so from high levels of production that Brazil has not reached and will not reach in the near future.
The Asian case deserves particular attention because it dispels comfortable myths. Japan produces 56.26 dollars per hour, more than double that of Brazil, even though it is the least productive member of the G7. China’s productivity is slightly lower than Brazil’s in absolute terms, but it has more than doubled its indicator since 2010. India has advanced almost 52% in the same period. The United States, starting from a high level, still grew 14.5%. Germany, 16.2%. Brazil, in the same period, went in circles: between 2012 and 2025, Brazilian productivity grew only 8.3%. It is the rhythm of a country that has renounced, without saying so, its ambition to prosper.
The paradox of the current debate is that the developed world won the right to work less because it began to produce more and better. The reduction in working hours in these countries was a consequence of successive productivity gains, not a cause. The Germans, Dutch and Danes work fewer hours than Brazilians because each hour they work is worth, in terms of product, four or five times more. Reversing this logic — reducing working hours before increasing production per hour — is a known recipe for impoverishment. There is no economic calculation that supports otherwise.
What we are witnessing in Brazil, therefore, is textbook populism. The proposal to reduce working hours arrives at Congress dressed in social modernity, but operates according to the country’s oldest electoral logic: distributing apparent benefits today, leaving the bill for later. It is the politics of the gesture, not the consequence. Immediate beneficiaries, dispersed throughout the electorate, will thank you at the polls; Deferred costs, in the form of lower investment, lower competitiveness and slower growth, will be attributed to future governments or to the convenient abstraction of the “system”. It is, ultimately, an intertemporal transfer of political costs — an operation in which Brazilian presidentialism specializes.
The cost of this choice is silence about what matters. While the debate consumes energy around the journey, the real agenda — logistical infrastructure, workforce qualifications, business environment, tax burden, legal security — remains untouched. Brazilian productivity remains hostage to the same pathologies that have paralyzed it for thirty years: predominance of roads in a country of continental dimensions, a labyrinthine tax system, education that is poorly formed, informality that protects inefficiencies, bureaucracy that burdens everything that moves. None of these topics yield an easy vote. None are resolved in a legislature. For this reason, none are treated. At the time, in Congress the predominant concern is binary: elections and criminal investigations.
The economic history of the developed world in recent decades is the story of a conscious choice for productivity, with reduced working hours as a delayed reward. Recent Brazilian history is the opposite story: we want the reward without the effort, the dinner without the bill. The result of this equation is predictable, and is written in the ILO, OECD and Conference Board data for anyone who wants to read it. We will continue discussing days off while others discuss value chains. We will continue to celebrate employment while others celebrate what each job produces. And Brazilian productivity, this central problem that no one wants to talk about, will remain where it is — ignored, persistent, and increasingly expensive.
While Brazil plays at being a Scandinavian country without power, more than 200 national companies have already moved to Paraguay. In time, it is worth remembering that in China – whose productivity is much better than ours – the working day is 44 hours a week that can be allocated over 5 or 6 days a week.
*Murillo de Aragão is a lawyer, journalist and political scientist, CEO of Arko Advice Pesquisas e Análise Política and adjunct professor at Columbia University
